“Prestigious
US academic institution Princeton University has banned researchers from giving
the copyright of scholarly articles to journal publishers, except in certain
cases where a waiver may be granted. The new rule is part of an Open Access
policy aimed at broadening the reach of their scholarly work and encouraging
publishers to adjust standard contracts that commonly require exclusive
copyright as a condition of publication.”

[The work in
question (The Lost Country, by J.R. Salamanca) appeared on a Hathi Trust
listing of orphaned works that were scheduled to be made available to the
public. The Author’s Guild, which is suing the Hathi Trust, determined that the
author was still very much alive and available, and did not want his work
freely distributed.]

[From the
article [Kevin Smith is Duke University’s Scholarly Communications
Officer]: Your “case,” if I can call it that,
illustrates two things. First, that the process of identifying orphan
works in the Hathi corpus needs to be tested and refined, which Hathi is
committed to doing. Second, in the rare instance like yours where the
process actually turns up an author who does still own copyright, the rational
course for that author is to embrace the mission of Hathi and of libraries
everywhere of connecting books with readers, and to exercise their right to
make their book(s) fully viewable. Please believe me, that is a much
better option than having a book live out its term of copyright on
hard-to-access shelves in high-density storage.]

[From the article: Several universities recently declared, against the wishes of
the Author’s Guild, that they will begin sharing digital versions of so-called
orphan works—books whose copyright holders can’t be found. Now the Guild has
produced a surprise find to undermine the universities. The Guild announced
today that it tracked down the author of one of the orphan works that the
universities plan to release this fall—and that it did so with a simple Google
(NSDQ:GOOG – News) search. The discovery is a
public relations coup for the Authors Guild, and comes just two days after it
filed a lawsuit to stop the schools from going forward with their plan.]

[From the article: One of the best
kept secrets in the world of publishing stems from nothing more than a lack of
consumer knowledge regarding the copyright laws as they pertain to individuals
with disabilities. As more and more readers tune in to the ever-increasing
numbers of electronic content, a wider understanding of the law is spreading,
especially among educational institutions, so that individuals can take full
benefit from existing legislation such as the Chafee Amendment and the Instructional Materials Accessibility Act. While
organizations have existed for many years to produce expensive and unwieldy
print editions of large-print and Braille-print books, new groups are forming
with the advent of digital publishing to make that accessibility even less
cumbersome. “We operate under the copyright law,” says Betsy Burgess of Bookshare.org, “meaning that
students who have a print disability can have access to books in alternate
formats without having to purchase them or compensate the author. Qualifications
for this purpose are things like a visual impairment, a physical disability, or
a severe learning disability like dyslexia, just to name a few.”]